NEAR Community Update: January 25, 2021

[jlwaugh]

Hello, NEAR family!

As you may know, one of the main goals for NEAR is greater accountability, using the power of smart contracts, i.e. open web services. This means we are committed to supporting all kinds of developers building real solutions. For all intents and purposes, transparent collaboration facilitates coordination around the shared vision of the whole NEAR ecosystem. We imagine a world where all people have control of their money, data, and power of governance.

This thread will begin a series of weekly updates, intended to bring everyone together and surface a few important links. I hope you reply with your own priorities and progress!

Highlight: 2021 Q1 Engineering OKRs

2021 Q1 Engineering OKRs

Hey everyone! Please find 2021 Q1 Engineering OKRs below. Please leave any comments or suggestions. Berry Pickers ← clickable Top commitments: Improve simulation testing; Publish best contract writing practices, including contract upgradability patterns; New fungible and non-fungible token standards. Bridge ← clickable Top commitments: Productionize bridge on Mainnet. We’ve been running bridge on Mainnet since Nov 2020, but unfortunately in is not very user-friendly as it requires using …

Summary

January has been a considerable turning point for NEAR, and I’m excited to share what I’ve gathered so far. Our core teams, known as the collective, recently began posting weekly updates here on the forum. This meta update links to specific team updates (and more).

You can see a list of posts tagged as “weekly updates” here:
http://gov.near.org/tag/weekly-updates

NEAR Engineering Update

2021-01-25 Engineering Update

Chain We have extracted near-memory-tracker into a separate repository! Consider using it. It has lower performance overhead than Valgrind, it can track linked C/C++ dependencies, and it can dump memory without affecting the process. We have added block ordinal in addition to block height which enables implementation of the light speed sync; Berry Pickers Check out community call on the Fungible Token Standard; Join discussion on the Account Registration Standard; Bridge We have fi…

Developer Relations Update

DevRel Weekly Update: 19-JAN-2021

Priorities Hiring Simple examples: ACTUAL blockchain examples Define the developer content audiences Identify what content to write EthDenver! (Deadline for prep: Feb 4th) Identifying top projects Redoing the grants evaluation/coordinator process for organizational speed. Education: Kernal Docs: onboarding easier, less-confusing, and less-convoluted Developer channel management Blockers Team Everyone having access to tools and admin Matt Intro calls are taking up a lot of DevRel time Hi…

Berry Pickers Update

At this time, the canonical location of updates is in the GitHub Discussions:

near/community Berry Pickers · Discussions

Rainbow Bridge Update

Bridge Weekly update 2020-01-22

The update is also available here. Video The video of the call is available here. Status, current goal Planned items: Implementation of monitoring Roadmap Clearing up the current deployments Hiring Done: Implementation of monitoring Bug fixes Hiring Plans for the next week: Roadmap Creating design for the NEP-4(NEP-141) bridge to NERC-20 Re-starting deployments Deploying UI Weekly update Alex Shevchenko Working on OKRs (alignment with EVM team) Hiring Step-by-step guide - 30% <-- depe…

EVM Update

2021-01-22 EVM Update

The weekly Friday update from the EVM Working Group: This week, we onboarded two new developers, worked on recruiting more developers, improved the EVM validation suite, and fixed a number of minor issues in EVM documentation and tooling. Next week, we are planning to translate current OKRs into a roadmap, get started on adapting the EVM to use ETH as its base token, and begin work on benchmarking the EVM. Find the full meeting notes on GitHub, and the video recording on YouTube: …

Recent Blog Posts

2020 NEAR In Review & Ecosystem Tour

Early 2021 is bringing lots of exciting initiatives! We are planning to announce the launch of the NEAR Grants Program, debut improvements to the NEAR community governance experience, and release updates about the Rainbow Bridge

Dragonfly Capital Joins NEAR Validator Advisory Board

Open Web Collective

Open Web Collective just announced their second batch of projects, including Kamix, HEO, Verida, Nym, Sarcophagus, Wificoin, Paras, Hash Rush, MintGate, and Vezt. Read the tweet thread below for details on each company.

https://twitter.com/openwebfounders/status/1352373189775650816

Also, have a listen to this podcast episode featuring Marguerite DeCourcelle, CEO of Blockade Games, a leading blockchain video game development studio and maker of Neon District.

https://www.openwebcollective.com/podcast/episode/1c19a763/advice-for-creative-founders-in-blockchain-gaming-with-blockade-games-ceo-marguerite-decourcelle

Guilds

Our community has been really busy lately! We are in the process of carefully revamping the processes of guild formation, discovery, and coordination.

Guild Coordination

Each and every guild is encouraged to create a forum thread (a.k.a. topic) in order to facilitate more interactions with our ecosystem of guilds / communities Create your official thread, with a simple, easy-to-understand title like “Guild Name” Guild Charter Template Title: Name of your Guild Purpose(s): Why Vision(s): What Mission(s): How Leader(s): Who Group(s): Where Also, please communicate any project ideas or specific goals! Let us know if you want help clarifyin…

Below are highlights from two particularly active communities in our ecosystem. For a more comprehensive look at NEAR Guilds, check out these reports:
http://gov.near.org/tag/guild-report

Createbase

They have a brand new site!

https://createbase.community/blog

4NTS

https://nearguilds.com/2021/01/23/near-business-update-january-2021

Most Referred Forum Topics

• 2021 Q1 Engineering OKRs
• Add secp validator key to enable pessimistic bridge
• Planning for AssemblyScript support and integration for the next 6 months, starting Jan '21
• Community Squad we serve and empower the NEAR Ecosystem of Communities
• Welcome Egor Kulikov to the NEAR Team
• Launching Sputnik DAOs
• EVM Runtime base token

Community Participation

Please don’t hesitate to give updates on what you’re doing, as it relates to the NEAR ecosystem. Ask questions. Tell us about ideas or specific projects and goals. Share thoughts and feelings. Your feedback is much appreciated!